Community Newsletter - October 2025
Let’s see what October had to offer… 🎃 Trick or Treat on Specter St. Have you completed the final lab of Specter St. and found your lost companion, Bones? If you find him before November 28th – and are a member of the Community – you’ll receive a shiny digital badge on your profile. Need a hint, check out the Labs Live recordings or head over to the Help Forum and ask an expert. 🏆 Customer Awards Soon to be revealed, our Customer Awards celebrate some of our incredible customers, and there’s a special award for Community users! All will be revealed soon… 🛡️ The Incident Room This month we started a series of LinkedIn challenges, where we present a cybersecurity or crisis situation along with three choices of how to respond. Voting takes place either through reactions or comments. We later reveal how our cyber experts would have dealt with the situation. Patch Newsday October 2025 - As per usual, the Container 7 team have reviewed the latest Microsoft patches so that you don't have to. 🙌 Special Shout Outs Please join me in thanking this month's most helpful members in our Help & Support Forum. 1. barney 2. edgarloredo 3. LewisMutton 4. DG 5. Dragonstar16 If you'd like to see your name here one day, head on over to the forum and answer a question. 🔮 Looking Forward We’ve got some exciting plans for a redesign of the Community, focussed around what users look for when they visit, and the ability to showcase the latest and greatest content – can’t wait to share it with you all! As always, we want to hear from you. Please give us your feedback on your community experience and let us know what else you'd like to see. SamCommunity Newsletter - September 2025
BenMcCarthy But before we get into that, let’s take a look at all the great things we achieved together throughout September… 🏆 The Maze Challenge How did you manage with our most difficult lab challenge ever? Thousands of you attempted the challenge, but only 4 people escaped the Broken Maze! Congratulations if you were one of them. Need a hint, check out the Q&A Webinar or head over to the Help Forum and ask an expert. 📰 Community Updates Here are some of my favourite community articles from the last month: StevenBoyd shared his thoughts on CVE-2025-32463, a critical vulnerability in the sudo Linux utility. KitHudson shared his analysis of CVE-2025-53770, a critical, unauthenticated remote code execution vulnerability in on-premise Microsoft SharePoint servers. 🛡️ Container 7 Updates Container 7 is the home for our team of cyber security experts to post about their research, insights, and the latest threats and vulnerabilities that you need to know about. Scattered LAPSUS$ Hunters: The Cybercrime Group Redefining Threats - @ben and KevMarriott shared their thoughts on three of the most notorious groups this year, Scattered Spider, LAPSUS$, and ShinyHunters, joining forces. Patch Newsday September 2025 - As per usual, the Container 7 team have reviewed the latest Microsoft patches so that you don't have to. 🙌 Special Shout Outs Please join me in thanking this month's most helpful members in our Help & Support Forum. 1. autom8on 2. jcberlan 3. KingMashaba 4. LewisMutton 5. edgarloredo If you'd like to see your name here one day, head on over to the forum and answer a question. 🔮 Looking Forward We are very excited to welcome you to Specter Street, a Halloween-themed cybersecurity challenge where you'll use both offensive and defensive skills to solve a mystery unlike anything we’ve encountered before. Each week throughout October, we’ll drop new hands-on labs that slowly begin to uncover the secrets of Specter Street and the furry friend causing havoc. Look out for tomorrow’s blog post which will have all the details about this, and the rest of our Cybersecurity Awareness Month programming. As always, we want to hear from you! Please give us your feedback on your community experience and let us know what else you'd like to see. See you in the community soon! KieranCommunity Newsletter - August 2025
Hello again from Immersive HQ where we hope you all had a fantastic July. Looking for something to do on these long Summer evenings? Why not join us in Bristol on 14th August for our next meetup? This month we excited to welcome ex-hacker Glenn Wilkinson who will take us inside the hacker’s world to reveal how attackers think, and what the rest of us can learn from it. 🏆 The Human Connection Challenge Congratulations once again to the winners of season 1 of the Season 1 Finale Prize Draw. A number of you have asked for a leaderboard for the whole of the season, so we’ve crunched the numbers and come up with this: 🥇 First to Finish steven was the first to finish 6 of the 7 labs! ⏱️ Fastest to Complete onkelstony was the fastest to complete all 7 labs in just 15 hours 🎯 Most Accurate Xat had an average accuracy of 96.1% across all 7 labs 💪 Most Persistent barney completed all 7 labs in 14 attempts. Congratulations to everyone who took part. New challenges will be available very soon! 📰 Community Updates Here are some of my favourite community articles from the last month: Vibe coding your way to a ZAP MCP server - RobertKlentzeris shared his adventures in "vibe coding" to create a ZAP Model Context Protocol (MCP) server, demonstrating how AI can leverage existing SDKs to build new tools and highlighting the potential and challenges of this new coding paradigm. The secret to hosting an engaging Crisis Sim - TomBoyle shared practical advice on how to keep participants engaged and ensure the effectiveness of virtual crisis simulation sessions. CVE-2025-53770 - Unauthenticated Remote Code Execution via unsafe deserialization in Microsoft SharePoint Server In this blog, AmarKhan detailed his research journey to understand and weaponize the CVE-2025-53770 vulnerability, an unauthenticated remote code execution exploit in Microsoft SharePoint Server leveraging unsafe deserialization, by overcoming challenges in lab setup and payload analysis. We also hosted a community webinar on this topic, you can watch the recording here. 🛡️ Container 7 Updates Container 7 is the new home for our team of cyber security experts to post about their research, insights, and the latest threats and vulnerabilities that you need to know about. Patch Newsday July 2025 - As per usual, the Container 7 team have reviewed the latest Microsoft patches so that you don't have to. Weaponizing LLMs: Bypassing Email Security Products via Indirect Prompt Injection Ben McCarthy explains how Large Language Models can be exploited through hidden instructions in emails to reconstruct and present malicious links, thereby circumventing conventional email security products. Our Container 7 Team will be at Blackhat and DEFCON later this week. Keep an eye on the blog for their daily updates or say “Hi” if you see them there. 🙌 Special Shout Outs Please join me in thanking this month's most helpful members in our Help & Support Forum. 1. netcat 2. jamesstammers 3. Fa11acy 4. steven 5. SIgwe1 If you'd like to see your name here one day, head on over to the forum and answer a question. 🔮 Looking Forward Feeling lost without the Human Connection Challenge? Hit a dead end on your cybersecurity upskilling journey? Fear not, we have some a-maze-ing new challenge labs coming very soon 🌽 As always, we want to hear from you! Please give us your feedback on your community experience and let us know what else you'd like to see. See you in the community soon! Kieran
Community Newsletter - July 2025
Hello from Immersive HQ where we're getting ready for an extravaganza of events over this July! These include: 🎤 July 3rd - Beyond the Situation Room: What your crisis response looks like to the outside world 🎤 July 15th - Labs Live: Operational Technology 🎤 July 16th - Confessions of a Red Teamer: How Unseen Work Pays Off in a Crisis 🎤 July 17th - Immersive X Darktrace Community Meetup - London Yep, you read that correctly - our next in-person community meetup will be in London! We’ve teamed up with our friends at Darktrace and will be hosting an evening of cybersecurity talks and professional networking at Darktrace’s London HQ. Tell your teams, tell your colleagues, tell your friends... You’re all invited and you wont want to miss this one! 📰 Community Updates The Good This week, we enhanced the search functionality of this community by integrating our Help Center, which offers comprehensive help & support documentation, alongside your existing community articles. From now on, your community searches will return both community and help center resources... It's all at your fingertips! ✨ Read more here, try it out and let us know how you get on! The Bad It’s not always butterflies and rainbows in the world of community management and unfortunately we experience bugs on the community platform from time to time. Last week, we learned that the calendar invitation community you receive when you click “Attend” to one of our community events contains a dead link. We’ve reported this and are absolutely chasing it as a high priority, but, in the meantime, it’s best that you go to the event page itself when a webinar is due to start. We'll let you know when this is fixed. The Ugly Just kidding! There’s nothing ugly in this community, but the recent uptick in ClickFix phishing being used to socially engineer and get victims to download malware is pretty ugly alright. Here is some of my favourite community content from the last month: Catch the recording of MaxVetter & KevBreen's fireside chat, Decoding the May Retail Cyber Onslaught as events are still unfolding. Learn how to Build your first practical lab with Immersive’s lab builder product manager, MattParven. From Abstract to Action: Immersive One's Compliance Solution. Read about how a large healthcare customer has recently leveraged Immersive One for their training needs from Cyber Resilience Advisor, MarieHargraves. 🛡️ Container 7 Updates Did you notice our new Container 7 blog? Container 7 is the new home for our team of cyber security experts to post about their research, insights, and the latest threats and vulnerabilities that you need to know about. Patch Newsday June 2025 - The Container 7 team have reviewed the latest Microsoft patches so that you don't have to. Insider Threats: Definitions, Types & How to Detect Them 🙌 Special Shout Outs Please join me in thanking this month's most helpful members in our Help & Support Forum. 1. netcat 2. retornet 3. gwenael 4. dpnotnull 5. T3S0r0 If you'd like to see your name here one day, head on over to the forum and answer a question. 🔮 Looking Forward Did I mention that we’re taking July’s meetup to London? Sign up to catch talks from Immersive’s SabrinaKayaci, Appsec engineer & Darktrace’s Nicole Wong, Principal Analyst. Did you hear about the Immersive Cyber Resilience Awards 2025? Read on to learn how you can qualify for nine different awards this October. See you back in the community soon! TillyCommunity Newsletter - June 2025
Hello from Immersive HQ where once again we're getting ready for our next in-person community meetup on Thursday, June 12th. Come and join us for another evening of talks from cyber security experts RobertKlentzeris, KevBreen and MisterV. 🎁 Community Challenge Season 1 Congratulations to every single one of you who attempted our community challenge labs. Since we launched the challenge in November 420 of you have collectively logged over 2,600 lab attempts! Don't worry if you struggled. All of the walkthrough guides are available here. We are in the process of contacting the Season winners. 🏆 The Human Connection Challenge Over 100 of you attempted this month's challenge, and 19 completed it before the deadline! 🥇 First to Finish Waqar was the fastest community member to complete the lab - looks like you registered a community account just in time! ⏱️ Fastest to Complete Jamesstammers2 was the fastest to complete in just under 4 hours. 🎯 Most Accurate Markus onkelstony Jamesstammers2 m0ns00n IotS2024 barney gromych Xat CyberSharpe phurtim frakattk and netcat all got 100% - Nicely done everyone! 💪 Most Persistent Congrats to chuz2z who spent over 12 hours on this lab! Congratulations to all of our winners! If you haven't completed it yet you can find the walkthrough here. The Community Challenge is taking a short break while we prepare for Season 2. Please drop a comment below and let us know what you'd like to see in the next season. 📰 Community Updates Here are some of my favourite community articles from the last month: This month GreggOgden posted a 3 part series on Level Up Your Organisation's Resilience Using Cyber Drills: Part 1: Unlocking the Power of Cyber Drills with Immersive Part 2: Planning and Executing Effective Cyber Drills with Immersive Part 3: Analyzing Results and Building a Culture of Continuous Improvement 🛡️ Container 7 Updates Did you notice our new Container 7 blog? Container 7 is the new home for our team of cyber security experts to post about their research, insights, and the latest threats and vulnerabilities that you need to know about. Patch Newsday May 2025 - As per usual, the Container 7 team have reviewed the latest Microsoft patches so that you don't have to. ZEROLOT Analysis - Inside Sandworm’s Destructive New Wiper Decoding the May Retail Cyber Onslaught - Inside the World of Ransomware Cartels and Social Engineering 🙌 Special Shout Outs Please join me in thanking this month's most helpful members in our Help & Support Forum. 1. netcat 2. steven 3. retornet 4. Xat 5. CyberSharpe If you'd like to see your name here one day, head on over to the forum and answer a question. 🔮 Looking Forward Did I mention that we have a meetup in Bristol on Thursday, June 12th? Not in Bristol? Don't worry, next month we hope to host a meetup in London. Please get in touch if you would like to host us or speak. We also have lots of cyber drills taking place globally, you can find the details on our events page. Did you hear about the Immersive Cyber Resilience Awards 2025? Read on to learn how you can qualify for nine different awards this October. As always, we want to hear from you! Please give us your feedback on your community experience and let us know what else you'd like to see. See you in the community soon! KieranBeyond the Badges: Why Women in Cyber Events are a Game-Changer (for Everyone!)
Let’s be honest, traditional cyber conferences can sometimes feel a bit... well, a tad dry, can't they? We've all experienced the endless lectures, the slightly awkward coffee breaks that aren't quite conducive to proper networking, and enough tech deep-dives to make you genuinely pine for your admin tasks! But what if I told you there’s a completely different kind of event out there? One that’s actually, dare I say, genuinely enjoyable? From the moment I stepped in, I was greeted by a room absolutely buzzing with competent and knowledgeable professionals. The shared focus was palpable: to forge new connections and genuinely support one another. This wasn't a room of homogenous backgrounds; it was a vibrant mix of individuals from all walks of life – some cyber-adjacent, some industry newcomers, others in technical leadership roles. Crucially, there wasn't a hint of superiority or self-importance amongst them. It genuinely felt like everyone was eager to engage, to learn about each other, and to passionately discuss the very thing that brought us all together: Cyber! (Yes, we were delightfully a room full of nerds, and proud of it!) We swiftly moved into the main event room, ready to kick off the day's exciting agenda. I must take a moment here to express how incredibly proud I am of Immersive. Utilising our cutting-edge Crisis Sim tooling, we all participated in an extraordinarily engaging simulation, complete with fantastic DC Comic vibes (maintaining that wonderful nerd persona!). What truly set this simulation apart for me was the complete absence of fear when conversations were opened up to the entire room. I genuinely attribute this to the incredibly safe and supportive atmosphere that permeated the entire day. The debates and discussions at each table were simply brilliant, with diverse opinions and experiences beautifully articulated and every single person feeling truly heard. As another example of the brilliance of this event, there was also a moment where one of the guests, using just a lanyard and a pair of scissors, DIY'd a perfectly functioning fridge handle. Inspiring to say the least, though not something that was originally on the agenda. Amongst other fantastic introductions, including a shout-out to WITCH (Women in Tech & Cyber Hub – definitely worth exploring), our very own product powerhouse, Amy Millard, joined the discussion panel. She spoke eloquently about her journey of personal development, overcoming adversity, and masterfully balancing her home and work life. We also had the privilege of hearing from another inspiring Immerser and Woman in Cyber, Emma Walker. Her moving presentation beautifully highlighted the multitude of titles a person can simultaneously hold: Scientist, Psychologist, Wife, Daughter, and Mother to an adorable fur baby. Emma's talk sparked one of the most compelling discussion points of the day: ‘What does resilience truly mean to you?’ Now, if you've managed to navigate your way through this (admittedly lengthy!) post, I'd say that makes you incredibly resilient indeed! For me personally, resilience is about reaching a crossroads, having the courage to choose the most enjoyable option, dedicating yourself fully to that choice, and trusting completely that you've made the right decision. So, to wrap up, I want to share a message with every single professional in this industry, regardless of the gender you identify as: If you ever get the chance to attend a Women in Cyber-style event, DO IT. You might just find it's the most refreshing, insightful, and genuinely fun cyber experience you've ever had.Search smarter: Community & Help Center content, all in one place!
We’ve integrated our Help Center with this community This means when you search for content using the search bar within the community, the searches now return both Community and Help Center content, so you can access all the information and guidance you need to succeed in one place. What’s the difference between the Community and the Help Center? Help Center Provides comprehensive guidance on using Immersive One, including how to get started with the platform, step-by-step workflows and how-to guides, release notes, Frequently Asked Questions documents, troubleshooting assistance, and lab content catalogues. Community The community is where Immersive One users come for SME-guided articles, peer-to-peer support forums, events, product updates, challenges and community notices. What else? The advanced search functionality and search filters have also been improved, so you can increase the accuracy of your search results; filtering from events, to community users - the search parameters are set by you. We hope you like what you see with this enhanced search functionality. To get into the specifics on how to use it, check out our Knowledge Base article, How to Search.Community Newsletter - May 2025
Hello once again from Immersive HQ where we are preparing to host our next in-person community meetup tomorrow (May 7th). If you'd like to join us for another evening of professional networking and cybersecurity talks please RSVP Here. 🎁 Community Challenge Season 1 Finale ICYMI yesterday we announced an exciting end to Season 1 of the Human Connection Challenge with some great prizes up for grabs including: 🥇 Tickets, Flights & Accommodation to an Immersive Summit in NYC or London 🥈 2 x PlayStation®5 Consoles 🥉 10 x Apple AirPods or JBL Headphones 👕 Much coveted Immersive swag and goodies! You can read all about the competition (including full terms and conditions) here. 🏆 The Human Connection Challenge Over 300 of you attempted this month's challenge, and 22 completed it before the deadline! 🥇 First to Finish Once again steven completed the lab just a few hours after it's release! ⏱️ Fastest to Complete Markus was the fastest to complete in 1 hour 20 minutes. 🎯 Most Accurate Despite the difficulty, the following members all got 100% accuracy in their first attempt: barney autom8on CyberSharpe IotS2024 edgarloredo Markus CBAM964 Xat BigChungus Al13nz steven 💪 Most Persistent The most persistent also goes to steven who spent nearly 9 hours in total in the lab... what were you up to in there? Congratulations to all of our winners! If you haven't completed it yet you can find the walkthrough here. And remember, for every challenge lab that you have completed by 2nd June you get an extra entry in the Season Finale Prize Draw! 📰 Community Updates Here are some of my favourite community articles from the last month: The Softer Side: Non-technical Benefits to Technical Team Exercises It can be easy to focus readiness programs solely on individual upskilling and technical capability, but we rarely use these skills in isolation in real-world situations. In this article JennyLam discusses how technical exercising can be an effective way of taking those skills to the next level, applying them to different scenarios and less-than-ideal circumstances. Decoding Coding: Picking a Language In this article, BarnyStewart provides guidance and tips for anyone interested in coding who isn’t a professional developer. The first step in the coding journey is picking a language, and this article will take you through the options. An Ounce of Prevention Beats a Pound of Postmortem with Supply Chain Security EllaBendrickChartier's latest article dissects the hidden dangers in your supply chain, from compromised tools to vendor vulnerabilities, and shows you how to build a proactive security culture with Immersive Labs and Crisis Simulations. Secure Code Comments: One Easy Way to Steward Your Application Security Culture Application Security Content Engineer RobertKlentzeris explores how incorporating security-focused comments into code can elevate developers' skills, improve team security awareness, and foster a proactive security culture within the software development lifecycle. Check out the Find the Flaw exercise to test your skills. 🙌 Special Shout Outs Please join me in thanking this month's most helpful members in our Help & Support Forum. 1. netcat 2. jagira 3. autom8on 4. steven 5. ray96 If you'd like to see your name here one day, head on over to the forum and answer a question. 🔮 Looking Forward Did you hear about the Immersive Cyber Resilience Awards 2025? Read on to learn how you can qualify for nine different awards this October. We are also looking forward to the next Labs Live event on 15th May. In this webinar, MattParven, Principal Security Engineer & Cloud Security SME will talk you through one of our cloud computing labs as he tackles it live! Finally, we want to hear from you! Please give us your feedback on your community experience and let us know what else you'd like to see. See you in the community soon! KieranCommunity Newsletter - April 2025
Hello from Immersive HQ in Bristol UK where last week we hosted our first ever in-person community meetup. Ever since we launched this community last September we've been keen to find ways to make it more than just a collection of online forums and blogs about our products, and it would appear that you agree! Last Thursday 45 of you turned out for a standing-room only night of cybersecurity talks including the History of Encryption and the Future of Quantum Computing... it was great to put some faces to usernames! These sessions were not recorded, so you'll have to join us for our next meetup to see what it's all about. If you can't make it to Bristol, we are working on our plans to go further afield in the future. If you'd like to speak at a meetup or can offer accomodation please let us know. 🏆 The Human Connection Challenge Over 250 of you attempted this month's challenge, but only 10 completed it before the deadline! 🥇 First to Finish Once again steven completed the lab just a few hours after it's release! How does he do it? ⏱️ Fastest to Complete Steven was also the fastest to complete, with onkelstony coming in second in just under 3 hours. 🎯 Most Accurate Despite the difficulty, the following members all got 100% accuracy in their first attempt: BigChungus autom8on Markus IotS2024 Xat 💪 Most Persistent This month, the most persistent award goes to audeyisaacscba netcat barney MathewM Congratulations to all of our winners! If you haven't completed it yet you can find the walkthrough here. 📰 Community Updates This month we've been mostly concerned with last week's meetup, so there's not been too many changes around here, but hopefully you didn't mis BenMcCarthy and benhopkins fantastic SmokeLoader Blog Series: Reverse Engineering SmokeLoader: An In-Depth Analysis (Stage 1) Reverse Engineering SmokeLoader: An In-Depth Analysis (Stage 2) Reverse Engineering SmokeLoader: An In-Depth Analysis (Part 3) 🙌 Special Shout Outs This month we are introducing a new feature to the newsletter where we give thanks to the most helpful members in our Help & Support Forum. 1. steven 2. IotS2024 3. T3S0r0 4. pschmidt 5. Xat If you'd like to see your name here one day, head on over to the forum and answer a question. 🔮 Looking Forward The penultimate community challenge was launched earlier today and we have big plans for the season finale in May! Meanwhile, the project to integrate our Knowledge Base with the Community is in full swing and we anticipate that you will be able to use the search bar at the top of this page as a one stop shop for all of your Immersive needs in just a few weeks. I'm personally looking forward to the next Puppetmaster Crisis Sim on Thursday 3rd April and of course, the next meetup on 7th May at our Bristol HQ. Finally, we want to hear from you! Please give us your feedback on your community experience and let us know what else you'd like to see. See you in the community soon! KieranCommunity Newsletter - March 2025
Greetings from the UK where the evenings are finally getting lighter, the daffodils are desperately trying to bloom and the sun finally seems to be making a regular appearance. While spring may not have officially sprung yet, here at Immersive, change is in the air. Hopefully you have already noticed the launch of our new brand and the Immersive One platform. After many months of hard work across every team in every area of the business it really is a joy to announce this to the world and so I thought that I’d take this opportunity to share the promo video again (mostly because the soundtrack is an absolute banger!). 🏆 The Human Connection Challenge With the official launch of the new brand I’m also excited to FINALLY reveal the designs of our 2025 challenge coins which will soon be winging their way to the winners of Episode 4 of the Human Connection Challenge: 🥇 First to Finish You need to be quick to beat steven who regularly completes our challenge labs within hours of their release. ⏱️ Fastest to Complete New member Aleandro_Sy was the fastest community member to complete the lab in just 1 hour 45 minutes. 🎯 Most Accurate Despite this being the hardest challenge yet, 22 people got 100% accuracy, including the following community members: audeyisaacscba IotS2024 Xat Markus CrouchS barney Al13nz autom8on isaias00 noobr steven 💪 Most Persistent This month, the most persistent award goes to MathewM Congratulations to all of our winners! Did you know that every member who completes a challenge lab gets a digital version of this coin? But you’ll need to register to claim it! Challenge coins not your thing? Already got one? Don’t worry, we are working hard to make additional prizes and swag available in the not too distant future. 📰 Community Updates There have been a few other changes here in the Human Connection as well. You may have noticed that we’ve added a weekly leaderboard to the Help & Support Forum and we’ve also added some new content tags to make it easier to find and follow the content that you are looking for. Take a look at the new Feature Focus blog series or our recent blogs on Cyber Threat Intelligence. You can even find previous versions of this newsletter here. 🙌 Special Shout Outs Congratulations to netcat for being the first person to ascend to Silver member status and to steven for being the second! Between them they have a combined total of 95 Posts, 128 Likes and 13 Accepted Solutions! Some special swag will be on its way to you both as soon as it’s available! I also want to take a moment to celebrate our very own Anonymous who, after months of dedication, effort and hard work, is now a certified project management professional. Congratulations Tilly! 🔮 Looking Forward Yesterday we kicked off a project to integrate our Knowledge Base with the Community. In a few short months you will be able to use the search bar at the top of this page as a one stop shop for all of your Immersive needs. I'm personally looking forward to the next webinar in our Operational CTI series. In this interactive session, BenMcCarthy and benhopkins will walk us through the steps that they took to reverse engineer SmokeLoader to create their recent lab on CVE-2025-0411 (7-ZIP MoTW Bypass). The event will be hosted live on Thursday March 6th, right here in the community and I’d love to see you there. And don’t worry, Spring is coming! Kieran
